


Variations in Light

by worldaccordingtofangirls



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drabble, Kissing, M/M, and them having eggs for breakfast, just something short and sweet, more of my obsession with sherlock epistemology and love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-13 03:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16884429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/worldaccordingtofangirls/pseuds/worldaccordingtofangirls
Summary: Some things resist classification. Sherlock loathes it, or wants to.





	Variations in Light

Sherlock does not respond to good mornings. On a semantic level, he finds them fraudulent—when people tell him good morning, they do not actually mean that the morning is good, or that they want him to have one. Instead, the words stop meaning what they purport to mean and function as ritual, with a soft, shifting connotation that depends on who says it to you, and how. When people on the train say it, it’s because they feel they have to. When his barista says it, it’s because she actually has to. When Lestrade says it, it’s to acknowledge that he sees Sherlock and John, regardless of how he may feel about that. Sherlock finds it deliberately obfuscatory, close to cowardly, the way the meaning of the phrase loosens itself from the words, darts away from them. There are so many potential different meanings that good morning is virtually impossible to theorize, to classify; he is forced to take it on a case-by-case basis, and he hates it.  

By now John knows this, so when he tells him good morning, it’s just to annoy him. And by now, well—Sherlock has not stopped being annoyed. Still, he tries not to react, crouching lower over his astronomy textbook as John shuffles through the kitchen.  _We see an absorption line spectra when a cool gas lies between us and a hot, glowing object._ Sherlock hardly wants to learn about the solar system, of all things, but it’s for a case. And for a case, anything. So he is reading about stellar spectra, how the light patterns in stars vary according to the state of the atoms in their hydrogen molecules, which absorb certain photons and spit others back out. The resulting patterns of light-dark are not always visible to the naked eye but they are, nonetheless, there.

At his elbow, John places a cup of tea, a plate of eggs.

 _Some stars have spectra in which the Balmer absorptions lines of hydrogen are prominent. But in the spectra of other stars, including the Sun, the Balmer lines are nearly absent and the dominant absorption lines are those of heavier elements such as calcium, iron, and sodium._  

“Sherlock,” says John.

“No,” says Sherlock.

“Sherlock,” says John.

Sherlock glares but picks up his fork, breaks the yolk. The yellow spills out. They eat.  _Still other spectra are dominated by broad absorption lines caused by molecules, such as titanium oxide, rather than single atoms._ As he’s taking his plate to the sink, John leans over and murmurs good morning—insipid, he said it once already—and touches Sherlock’s cheek, tilts his head.   

In a kiss, there are many things to calculate. Angle, chin and nose. The rate of inhale, exhale. The temperature of John’s skin—Kelvins, imagine it were the spectrum of a star, no, too fanciful, his mouth is not nearly warm enough to produce visible variation in light, the very notion is preposterous. Sherlock can know these things, does know them, and in knowing them takes a pride so fierce it begs the question of what he’s afraid of losing. Despite all that he knows, he is never certain, exactly, how it will feel. John moves against him, and it’s always a little different, because there is something malleable, something fluid about it—something dependent on Sherlock, where he moves, what he chooses this to mean. 

_To cope with this diversity, astronomers group similar-appearing spectra into spectral classes. In a popular scheme that emerged in the late 1890s, a star was assigned a letter from A through O according to the strength or weakness of the hydrogen Balmer lines in the star’s spectrum. Still, nineteenth-century science could not describe the full continuum, and…_

Some things resist classification. Sherlock loathes it, or wants to. And yet he closes his eyes and, kissing John back, imagines variation in light.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in 2017 for a class called daily themes at yale. we wrote ~350 words for a prompt every day and i went waaaaay over the word count heheh. the prompt was "Write a piece of fan fiction in which you choose a well-known character (such as Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennett, Hamlet, Holden Caulfield) and invent a scene that tells us something about that character we don’t know." i was also taking an astronomy course at the time and i had to do some reading for it that night; i was feeling low on inspiration so i ended up using excerpts from my textbook, and this piece popped out! both classes were very fun. how's that for queering the academy
> 
> i will never stop writing about john challenging sherlock's ideas about all knowledge being objective, emotionless, etc. men are so dumb especially you steven moffat
> 
> as always, thanks for reading! much love.


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